hagit sa handurawan

"Reimmersion (in native culture) is not an end in itself; it is to define more clearly the native grounds on which the Cebuano poet stands, the local parameters of language and experience, toward the end that he can stand in the world confident in the singular value of his own voice...

To conserve and extend the resources to which the Cebuano poet is heir by enhancing the natural rhythms of native speech, cultivating the rich concreteness of dialect, and confronting the particulars of his social experience...

The Cebuano poet today does not come upon a language that is already there, ready to use; he has to recreate it not only out of the rawness of daily speech but summon out of language that which has already fallen away from common consciousness and use."

-- Dr. Resil Mojares,
"Cebuano Poetry: Looking Backward, Forward."

matod nila, mando nato

"What could I say at all without my roots?... What could I say without coming to ground?... and I took no journey other than the return."-- Pablo Neruda

"And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."-- T.S. Eliot

"The work of language deserves our greatest care, for the tongue’s fire may devour the world, or may light the way."-- Scott Russell Sanders"Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god… The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island."-- Derek Walcott

"We ascend, from the infinite pit of our perceptions, to the finite life of words."-- William Bronk